Creating new therapeutic vaccines for the treatment of cancer

Brief description
Prof.dr. Ada Kruisbeek is CEO of DCPrime BV, a spin-off company of the VU university medical center (VUmc). The company focuses on creating new therapeutic vaccines for the treatment of cancer, using unique sustainable dendritic cell (DC) lines that were developed in the lab of prof. Dr. Rik Scheper and Dr. Tanja de Gruijl. DCPrime is hosted at the Department of Pathology.

Unique selling point
DC-based vaccines can sometimes produce spectacular results in individual patients. Since these vaccines are based on patient-derived DC, however, they pose significant logistic and standardization problems. DCPrime develops a novel type of DC vaccines, since it created a platform for making sustainable DC lines. These can be grown according to a reproducible pharmaceutical development process, and therefore bypass the problems associated with currently available DC vaccines. These cell lines can be loaded with any desired tumor antigen, and with other genes of interest (such as immuno-modulatory genes). An extensive pre-clinical database shows that these DC lines have all the functional properties of regular DC. Products based on this technology can be clinically applied as off-the-shelf DC vaccines.  

Current stage of R&D
The lead product, DCOne, is currently being prepared for entering clinical testing in a first indication by the end of 2008. Scale-up procedures have been developed, and QA/QC compliant dossiers are being built on product specifications, product parameters, harvesting and storage conditions, quality assays and reproducibility of all processes. Master and working cell banks will be ready by mid-2008. The second and third clinical validation studies are scheduled for 2009 and 2010.

DCPrime also uses its technology to perform contract research for pre-clinical validation of innovative DC targeting tools and immune system modulating targets.

Contact details
Prof.dr. Ada Kruisbeek
CEO DCPrime BV
p/a Technology Transfer office VU & VUmc
De Boelelaan 1085 (W&N, F-546)
1081 HV Amsterdam
The Netherlands

Phone +31 (0)20 59 85 601
E-mail kruisbeek@tto.vu.nl
www.dcprime.nl